Jessie Bernard

In the 1880s her parents immigrated separately to the United States from Transylvania (today in Romania).

Bernard's father started out delivering dairy products in Minneapolis, later became a haberdasher and finally a real estate broker.

At the time, the Ravitch family were the only Jewish-immigrant family to reside in a middle-class community.

With regards to Bernard's education, her parents believed she was better off pursuing an education in business school.

Jessie Shirley Bernard (born Jessie Sarah Ravitch, 1903 – 1996) was an American sociologist and noted feminist scholar.

She was a persistent forerunner of feminist thought in American sociology and her life's work is characterized as extraordinarily productive spanning several intellectual and political eras.

However, Bernard graduated from public high school in 1920 and left home to study in social sciences at the University of Minnesota.

Bernard completed her undergraduate and post-graduate studies at the University of Minnesota.

She earned her BA (magna cum laude) in 1923 and her MA in sociology in 1924.

Her MA thesis was titled "Changes of Attitudes of Jews in the First and Second Generation" that earned her the Harris Prize.

During her studies here she became actively involved in attempts to establish sociology as a recognized profession within American academia and she actively participated in the injection of empirical research into meetings of the American Sociological Society.

Bernard studied with Pitirim Sorokin (founder of the sociology department at Harvard) and became research assistant to her sociology professor, Luther Lee Bernard.

Bernard studied and wrote about women's lives since the late 1930s and her contributions to social sciences and feminist theory regarding women, sex, marriage, and the interaction with the family and community are well noted.

She has garnered numerous honors in her career and has several awards named after her, such as the Jessie Bernard Award.

Jessie Bernard was a prolific writer, having published 15 sole-authored books, 9 co-authored books, over 75 journal articles, and over 40 book chapters.

The final chapter of her book American Community Behavior is heavily based on Raphael Lemkin's work and is considered one of the earliest sociological studies of genocide.

Jessie Bernard (born Jessie Sarah Ravitch) was born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

She was the third of four children born to Jewish-Romanian parents, Bessie Kanter and David Soloman Ravitch.

At Washington University in St. Louis, Bernard continued her research and later earned her PhD in sociology in 1935.

Together, the Bernards challenged the dominance of the University of Chicago in the field of sociology that ultimately saw their involvement in the creation of the American Sociological Review.

Bernard took up a teaching position at Lindenwood College in 1940 where she remained teaching for the next 7 years.

Following the events of World War II, in particular the Nazi Holocaust, Bernard started to move away from the positivistic approach dominant in social science and became increasingly supportive of the social contextuality of all knowledge.

This time would also mark her movement toward a feminist position in sociology as seen in the qualitative research and critical analysis prevalent in her later work.

Since the mid-1940s, Jessie's focus was to increase understanding of the effects of sexism on women's experience of marriage, parenting, education and economic life.

In 1947, her husband negotiated positions as lecturers for Bernard and himself at Penn State University.

Bernard managed to establish her own academic independence and became a Full Professor of sociology.

She remained here for the larger part of her academic career.

During her time as professor she became a founding member of the Society for the Study of Social Problems and helped legitimize feminist studies.

She retired as Professor Emeritus from Penn State University at age 62.

Although her retirement marked her movement out of academic life, Bernard devoted herself to writing and research on a full-time basis as well as remaining an active feminist in the women's movement for the next two decades.

This would also be the period of her life that saw extraordinary productivity in terms of her research and writings.

She published the majority of her books in this period as well as several articles and presentations, establishing herself as a leading contributor to professional and lay understandings of the sociology of gender.

Her work was further marked by a critical rejection of sociology as a positivistic science to the extent where she rethought her early writings in light of a feminist position.

This period of Bernard's life would also see her as president of the Eastern Sociological Association, president and founding member of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, founding board member of the Center for Women Policy Studies as well as member of the boards of Urban Institute Women's Program and the Women's Equity Action League.

During this time she was also a visiting professor at Princeton University.

Bernard lectured at professional meetings and universities around the world and met women from all over the world in international women's meetings.

In 1977, Bernard became an associate of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press (WIFP).

WIFP is an American nonprofit publishing organization.

The organization works to increase communication between women and connect the public with forms of women-based media.

Bernard characterized her own work as a movement towards contemporary feminism or what she also referred to as "the feminist enlightenment".